In a move to develop higher-performance databases, Oracle has tightened integration between its in-memory database system, TimesTen Release 7, and its flagship Oracle 10g database in hopes that customers will use TimesTen as a front-end service to 10g.

TimesTen is the former startup commercial system that Oracle acquired in July 2005. The TimesTen database system resides in the random access memory of a server and is able to respond very quickly to data requests--at speeds that rival the movement of electrical impulses. That makes it suitable for financial services and trading systems, where response times are crucial down to tenths of a second.

Those systems are some of the places TimesTen has been used so far, says Jim Groff, formerly TimesTen's CEO, now Oracle's senior VP of business strategy. Groff thinks customers will soon make wider use of its near-real-time properties.

"People do more searching than they used to," he says. "It's exploding" in areas such as travel. If the data being sought has been pulled out of a back-end database and is cached in TimesTen, the time it takes to go from "look to book" in reserving a flight, hotel, or car can be sped up to the point that it's a competitive advantage, he says.

TimesTen Release 7 ships preconfigured with three caching options, one of which may be invoked out of the box.